


The Ring: An Instant Messaging Cutaway

by TheSaddleman



Series: Instant Messaging [9]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Filling in a plot hole, Friendship, Humour, Minor Angst, Mysteries, Rings, Romance, Slight fluff, continuity cavalcade, simpatico, spoilers for doctor who episode forest of the dead, whouffaldi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:40:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26876830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSaddleman/pseuds/TheSaddleman
Summary: Clara Oswald has been travelling with the Doctor for years, but it never occurred to her to ask about the ring he always wears. The answer is not what you'd expect.
Relationships: Twelfth Doctor & Clara Oswin Oswald, Twelfth Doctor/Clara Oswin Oswald
Series: Instant Messaging [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/579631
Comments: 7
Kudos: 33





	The Ring: An Instant Messaging Cutaway

**Author's Note:**

> Actor Peter Capaldi has been happily married for more than a quarter century. It is said that, whenever possible, he avoids removing his wedding ring when performing, and that included his time as the Twelfth Doctor, making him the first Doctor since William Hartnell to wear a ring. There's been speculation as to what the ring signifies, including whether it's meant to be the same ring that fell off the First Doctor's finger as he regenerated. This story, set during the Series 9 timeframe, posits a theory that is different than others you may have seen.
> 
> This was not originally meant to be a tie-in with my Instant Messaging series, and doesn't follow the format of those stories, but the connection will become evident. In terms of chronology, it takes place somewhere in the middle of the pack, following the events of two particular stories, though as I have to place it somewhere in the AO3 story order, I arbitrarily put it between IV and V.

Clara realized she had just spent the last ten minutes staring at the Doctor. 

It wasn’t an unpleasant ten minutes for her, not by a long shot. That said, had it been anyone else but the Doctor — whose real name (Clara became more convinced of every passing day) likely was High Gallifreyan for Tunnel Vision — it might not have been very pleasant to be on the receiving end. Most people do not like being stared at—even if by a pair of intense brown eyes that at times looked as if they had been nicked off a Disney Princess.

Still, Clara Oswald, once a former nanny to two children but of late a formal nanny to thirty (or thirty-one, depending on the Doctor’s mood on the day), was content to just watch the Doctor as his long fingers danced hypnotically across a keypad on the TARDIS control console. He might have been impersonating his friend Beethoven composing a symphony at the piano, rather than trying to track down the space-time co-ordinates for the latest wonder world he wanted to show his companion (at one point, he muttered something under his breath about having accidentally deleted a bookmark).

Clara’s gaze eventually focused on one shiny-gold aspect of the wild-grey-haired Time Lord’s left-hand digits.

“What’s the ring for, Doctor?” she finally broke the silence with. 

“You’ve been my companion-”

“- _carer_ -” she corrected with a smile.

“-carer for how many years, and you just noticed I wear a ring?”

Clara reached out with her right hand. The Doctor, with a shrug, firmly grasped it with his own right. “So we’re doing this now? Hugging passé?” he asked.

“I’m not offering to shake your hand, you idiot. Give me your other one. I want to take a better look at that ring.”

The Doctor playfully stuck his tongue out at her and offered his left hand.

Clara bent closer to give the ring a close inspection. It took a moment for the Doctor to realize she suddenly had a jeweller’s loupe over her right eye socket.

“Since when did you carry one of those around?” he asked.

“I’m the Impossible Girl. Just accept it. Shush now. Looking.” 

There was no doubt it was real gold, but if Clara expected to see any specific details in the little band, she came away disappointed.

Still, “Very pretty,” she announced, popping the loupe out of her eye and placing it back in the same random jacket pocket from which she had retrieved it. “I know you have had it since we met. Or, re-met, I guess. So, the schoolteacher who is a screaming genius, yet also a tiny bit sexy, repeats her earlier question: What’s the ring for, Doctor? You never had it before. Did it clash with your bow-tie and fez collection?”

The Doctor took his hand back and smiled, sadly. “This is not an ordinary ring, Clara. I used to wear it back in my first life when I was young and grey…er. It fell off after my first regeneration and I only found it again after my last change.”

“Where?”

He looked a bit sheepish. “On my hand, actually. It just appeared. I was too busy obsessing over my kidney colour to notice it was back until later. I guess the TARDIS must have put it there, though she’d given it a bit of a facelift so it looked less like a cast-off from Liberace’s dressing table and more like, well, a regular ring. She does that sometimes. The first time I regenerated, she even gave me a whole new wardrobe, which confused Ben and Polly to no end. The second time I changed, I ended up with a tattoo. Don’t ask why or how she put it there. I think she was trying to give me a laugh after the High Council put me on trial for the first-ish time.”

“A tattoo?” Clara arched an eyebrow. “I didn’t think you went in for tattoos. What was it? Some heavy metal design? ‘I-heart-Mother’?”

The Doctor looked embarrassed. “A snake, actually. One of my old colleagues, the Corsair, had a similar one. A TARDIS was probably to blame for that one, too.”

She reached out for his sleeve. “Do you still have it? Let me see!” Clara said, playfully. Hereafter the narrative pauses to allow a petite human female a few moments of chasing a two thousand(ish)-year-old Gallifreyan Time Lord around the console. The Doctor took an unusually long time to finally say that the tattoo had disappeared after his third life ended and no, he didn't end up with another to go with his appropriated ring the last time he regenerated.

Clara pouted for a moment, sad the chase had ended. Then she turned her attention back to the matter at hand (pun intended). “So, is it some sort of wedding ring, then? You’ve probably amassed a fair collection of those,” Clara said, changing the subject. (Aside from an insatiable thirst for adventure, another thing she shared with one Dr. Indiana Jones, Esq., was a general dislike of snakes.)

“You might call it that. More a symbol of commitment to someone whom my hearts are simpatico with. Or so I understand.”

Clara smiled (though the smile didn’t completely reach her eyes this time). “Commitment to who, Doctor? River? Rose? Marilyn? Romana?”

“The fact is, I don’t know for certain,” the Doctor said. “The _ring_ knows, but I’ve never been able to get it to tell me in any detail.”

Clara took his hand again and gave the ring another look with revised appreciation. “What, this thing is alive? Are you going to tell me this thing turns you invisible and gives you the craving to call everything ‘ _My Preciousssss_ ’?” Her voice changed to a rasping hiss on the last two words.

“Is there something wrong with your throat, Clara?” the Doctor asked.

“Nothing a stiff drink won’t cure,” Clara sighed. _Sheesh, this guy can play_ Purple Haze _and_ Bela Lugosi’s Dead _blindfolded, but doesn’t get a_ Lord of the Rings _reference_ , she thought. 

“To answer your question, yes it’s alive. Sort of alive. Semi-alive,” the Doctor said. “And it knows the answer to the simpatico question, but the only way to know who I’m linked to is I have to take the ring off and have a look at the inside of the band. The name will be there.”

“Okay, so why don’t you just slide it off and take a peek? Why keep up the mystery?”

The Doctor pulled his hand back out of her reach, almost defensively. “I don’t know if I want to know.”

“Come again?”

“There could be any name on this ring, Clara. The name isn’t always the same, either. One of the consequences of making Methuselah look like a toddler is it changes over time. It will be the name of a person who is still alive in my personal timeline, right now; that’s all I know, so it won’t have River’s name, for example, because from my perspective she died more than a thousand years ago at the Library, even if I married her later; if I had the ring and looked back when I was Mr. Sandshoes, maybe I might have seen her name. I don’t know if Romana survived the Time War, so it may not be her. And, what if … it’s your name?”

Clara suddenly hugged the Doctor, an impulsive move she couldn’t resist. “You keep saying we’re simpatico. That’s why we can do the instant messaging thing with the psychic paper. Maybe it does have my name?”

The Doctor usually enjoyed Clara’s hugs. Only Clara’s, mark you; Strax tried to hug him once and it did not end well for Madame Vastra’s Sontaran butler, who learned a quick lesson in Venusian aikido—something the Doctor immediately regretted as he then had to spend the rest of the evening training an excited Sontaran how to do Venusian aikido. 

This time, though, he pulled away, leaving a disappointed Clara hanging.

“You don’t understand, Clara. Any name could be on this ring.”

“I got that part.”

“What if it’s not you? What if there’s some random name on there, like Henrietta? Or Jennifer? Or what about Strax? Remember, he got involved with our psychic paper thing once, too. I can think of no greater torture than being linked to _him_.”

“Your cat did the psychic paper thing once, too, Doctor. And I don’t recall you ever talking about settling down with a cat and retiring from time travel.”

The Doctor looked perplexed as he picked up on the implication. “I don’t recall ever talking about settling down with _you_ and retiring from time travel, either.”

“No, but you’ve thought about it a few times. Admit it.”

The Doctor smiled slightly. “Once or twice. Usually after we’ve escaped from some space-prison by the skin of our teeth. For the second time in a week.”

Clara motioned for the Doctor to give her his left hand again. “Where did you find it, anyway?”

“I received it as a gift minutes before I left Gallifrey with Susan. I can’t remember clearly who gave it to me. Some TARDIS lab tech. She just pressed it into my hand before Susan and I departed and said something about taking care of it for her. I had a lot of things on my mind at the time, so I just put it on a finger for storage and forgot I had it on. Until I started getting the sense there was more to it than just esthetic value. You could say it spoke to me in a dream. I started to sense it around the time the TARDIS malfunctioned and nearly threw us into the Big Bang, turning Susan, Ian, Barbara and myself slightly psychotic in the process. Well, slightly more psychotic than usual, anyway.”

“Everything's an adventure with you," Clara chuckled. She rubbed her thumb across the ring. “Sure you don’t want to look?”

“I’m certain.”

“Then why keep the ring on at all if you will just disagree with what it says anyway?”

The Doctor shrugged. “Contrary to what some people claim, Time Lords do not have X-ray vision. As long as it’s safely on my finger, I can’t read what it says on the inside. If I took it off, put it in a drawer somewhere, I’d still have the compulsion to look. Like how I can’t pass a big red button without pushing it.”

“I can relate to that,” Clara mused.

“So best to just leave it a mystery. I’m used to mysteries; I’m the man who signs his autograph with a question mark, after all.”

“But Doctor, doesn’t that mean you’ll always have a doubt? About, well, us?”

The Doctor put his arm around Clara’s shoulders and let her resume their interrupted hug.

“What I don’t know won’t hurt us. Clara Oswald and the Doctor, in the TARDIS. Who cares what some magic space-ring says?”

After a few moments, Clara let go and the Doctor went back to hunting for the misplaced wonder-planet co-ordinates.

“I think we’re both long overdue for some tea. I’m making this time; you just keep hunting for that planet you owe me,” she said.

“Yes, boss,” the Doctor replied, his attention once again fully engaged by the scanner.

Clara stopped on the stairs leading down to the corridor that (eventually) led to the kitchen and turned back. “I wonder if there’s any way to find out who that woman was who gave you that ring in the first place? Might solve a bit of the mystery.” 

The Doctor shrugged. “She’s likely impossible to track down now,” he said, before looking up from the scanner. “But knowing my luck, the answer is probably staring me in the face.”

**Author's Note:**

> Concordance time:
> 
> Sorry, not sorry for repeating the handshake joke from my earlier story, "Do You Like Lemonade" (so no, that wasn't deja vu).
> 
> The First Doctor's ring falls off his finger during the first regeneration in episode 4 of "The Tenth Planet" - and, when the Second Doctor gets up off the floor a few moments later in episode 1 of "Power of the Daleks," he's wearing a different outfit. Given what we now know about the TARDIS, she might have been responsible for this - as well as the sudden appearance of a ring on the Twelfth Doctor's finger after his regeneration in "Time of the Doctor."
> 
> The real-life snake tattoo visible on Jon Pertwee's arm in "Spearhead from Space" has long been a source of puzzlement in terms of why the Third Doctor would suddenly have one (though to be fair, as we never saw Hartnell or Patrick Troughton shirtless, we do not know for certain that they didn't have it too). I believe Neil Gaiman giving the Corsair a similar tattoo in "The Doctor's Wife" was inspired by this. Again, I decided to blame the TARDIS. The "first-ish" trial refers to the events of "The War Games" that led to the Second Doctor's forced regeneration.
> 
> "Marilyn" is Marilyn Monroe (see "A Christmas Carol"); I was a Fourth Doctor-Romana shipper decades before I'd ever heard the name Clara Oswald. Her fate after the Time War has not yet been revealed, though Big Finish has introduced a third incarnation.
> 
> I don't think I need to explain who the woman was who gave the First Doctor the ring. If anyone is still puzzled, the answer lies in the opening scenes of "The Name of the Doctor".
> 
> "Bela Lugosi's Dead" was a popular punk-era song. I mention it because Capaldi's own punk band, the Dream Boys, recorded a song called "Bela Lugosi's Birthday" which might have been a response.
> 
> The TARDIS malfunction occurs in the early story "The Edge of Destruction" (also known as "Inside the Spaceship").
> 
> Yes, I know River is technically still alive in "The Husbands of River Song". Wibbley wobbley, timey-wimey is an all-purpose hand-wave, especially given that character's infamously messy timeline.
> 
> Strax appears in "Instant Messaging III 3/4"; the cat is Wolsey from the Virgin New Adventures novels who guest-stars in "Instant Messaging: Shut Up, Wolsey!".
> 
> The Doctor's fascination with big red buttons was revealed in "The Christmas Invasion"; Clara's similar attitude dates from "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS."


End file.
